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Cognitive Theories and the Design of
E-Learning Environments
Bijan B. Gillani
California State University, Hayward, USA
INTRODUCTION
The explosive growth of the Internet and the dramatic
advances in the design and development of online technological tools in recent years have revolutionized the
way students and teachers view technology in education.
These technical advances have made it possible to produce educational materials and transmit them over the
Web. Parallel to these technological advances, the field of
instructional design has made phenomenal contributions
to curriculum planning. A synergy of these two fields
would enable educators to produce effective electronic
educational materials.
Unfortunately, a great majority of e-learning sites that
use online tools lack appropriate theoretical foundations
for curriculum content organization. These sites, all
designed by highly intelligent and well-intentioned educators, use online technologies without any regard for
application of pedagogy to the design of courses. The
result is an iceberg-like curriculum where, at best, online
technologies have been used to cover the tip of teaching
and learning, leaving little time and effort for the students
to delve into deeper understanding of curriculum and
problem solving. There is a fundamental need for pedagogical approaches to design e-learning environments
whose foundations are supported by effective theoretical
foundations.
One of the most effective approaches to developing
appropriate pedagogical models for the design of e-learning is to understand how cognitive development occurs
naturally. Cognitive developmental theories attempt to
explain cognitive activities that contribute to the learners’
intellectual development and their capacity to solve problems. Once we understand how cognition develops, we
can derive a pedagogical model from it and then design
effective e-learning environments that are responsive to
how people learn naturally. In what follows, I will discuss
Piaget’s cognitive theory and derive an inquiry-training
model from it. Then I will discuss the design of an elearning environment that is based on Piaget’s model and
is adaptive to the cognitive needs of students.
PIAGET’S COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY
Piaget (1952) argued that children must continually reconstruct their own knowledge through a process of active
reflection upon objects and events until they eventually
achieve an adult perspective. To have a better appreciation of this process, it is essential to understand four other
concepts that Piaget proposed. These concepts are
schema, assimilation, accommodation, and equilibrium.
Schema
Piaget (1952) used the word schema to represent a mental
structure that adapts to environmental patterns. In other
words, schemata are intellectual structures, in terms of
“neuron assemblies,” that organize perceived events and
group them according to common patterns. Pearson and
Sapiro in the May 1982 issue of Instructor have provided
one of the earliest and probably the best explanations of
schema theory for instructional purposes:
What is a schema? It’s the little picture or associations
you conjure up in your mind when you hear or read a
word or a sentence. You can have a schema for objects
(chair, boat, and fan), an abstract idea of feeling (love,
hate, hope), an action (dancing and buying), or an event
(election, garage sale, and concert). It’s like a concept
but broader. For example, you see the word tree and you
conjure up the concept of a tree-trunk, branches, leaves,
and so on. Your schema for a tree includes all this, plus
anything else you associate with trees—walks down
country lanes, Christmas trees, birds’ nests, and so on. A
schema includes behavioral sequences, too. For example,
your schema for the word party could include not only
food, friends, and music, but also what you will wear,
how you will get there, how long you plan to stay, and so
on. And, of course, your schema for party is based on your
experience at party, which may differ substantially from
someone else’s. Schema is an abstraction of experience
that you are constantly fine-tuning and restructuring
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C
Cognitive Theories and the Design of E-Learning Environments
according to new information you receive. In other
words, the more parties you attend the more schema
adjustment you’ll make. (p. 46)
Schema is not limited to concepts, objects, data, and
their relationships. There are also procedural schemata
(Anderson & Pearson, 1984), which are the ways of
processing information. For example, students who have
acquired the basics of mathematics, such as adding,
multiplying, dividing, and subtracting, have internalized
the concept schemata about these mathematical operations. However, as the students grow, they gain new
abilities to solve problems that are related to mathematical
concepts. The ability to solve problems is a procedural
schema. Both concept and procedural schemata are
constantly restructured as new learning environments are
introduced to the learner.
Assimilation, Accommodation, and
Equilibrium
One of the most fundamental questions about schemata
is how are they restructured when new data or patterns are
discovered in the environment? Piaget was a biologist by
academic training. He was very comfortable with the
concept of biological adaptation to environmental stimuli.
For example, from a biological point of view, the human
body is structured to be constantly in a state of equilibrium in regard to its temperature. When the body temperature is raised by a few degrees during exercise, the entire
system goes into a state of disequilibrium. The feedback
mechanism senses such a state of disequilibrium and
internally responds by producing sweat and sending
more blood near the skin to cool the body down, thus,
restoring a state of equilibrium for the body.
Piaget used the same concept of biological equilibrium-disequilibrium states to explain the causes of cognitive restructuring in response to new learning experiences. For example, when students encounter a new
learning environment, a state of disequilibrium is created
within their brains that must be internally managed. In
other words, the new learning environment has placed the
brain in a state of disequilibrium. In order for the brain to
get back to the state of equilibrium, the learner has to add,
modify, or restructure his or her schemata to account for
the new situation. The internal mental mechanism or
processes that are responsible for the restructuring of
schemata so that the brain can get back to an equilibrium
state is called assimilation and accommodation (Piaget,
1952, 1964).
Assimilation is the cognitive process by means of
which people integrate new patterns, data, or processes
into their existing schemata. Piaget argued that, as learners assimilate input from the environment, the new
120
information is not simply stored in the mind like information in files in a filing cabinet. Rather new information is integrated and interrelated with the knowledge
structure that already exists in the mind of the person.
“Every schema is coordinated with other schemata and
itself constitutes a totality with differentiation parts”
(Piaget, 1952, p. 7).
For example, in teaching geometry, when a pentagon
is introduced to children, the salient features of this
geometric shape such as sides and angles are not simply
memorized. Rather, it is contrasted and integrated with
what is already known about other geometric shapes like
rectangles, triangles and squares. In other words, the
schemata for a pentagon includes, in addition to its shape,
sides, and angles, such related concepts as how its shape
compares with other geometric shapes, how its angles
compare with other geometric shapes, or how its area and
perimeter differ from other geometric shapes. Learning in
this manner of relating prior knowledge to new information is said to be meaningful because new schemata in the
child’s mental capacity have been formed.
Theoretically, assimilation does not result in changes
or restructuring of the schemata. Rather assimilation is the
process of placing new information into existing schemata. Assimilation can be compared to the air that you put
into a balloon. As you put more air in the balloon, it gets
bigger, but the shape of the balloon does not change. The
actual change or restructuring of the schemata occurs in
the accommodation process.
The change that occurs in the mental structure of
schemata is referred to as accommodation by Piaget
(1952). Upon facing new learning environments, sometimes the learner’s schemata can not assimilate the new
information because the patterns of the new stimuli do not
approximate the structure of the existing schemata. In
such cases, one of two things can happen: The learner can
create either new schemata or modify the existing schemata. In either case, the structure of schemata is being
changed so that it can accommodate new information.
Therefore, accommodation is the creation of new schemata or modification of old schemata. In both of these
cases, the result is a change in the cognitive structure or
the overall structure of schemata.
The process of cognitive development is the result of
a series of related assimilations and accommodations.
Conceptually, cognitive development and growth proceeds in this fashion at all levels of development from
birth to adulthood (Piaget, 1964). However, because of
biological maturation, major and distinctive cognitive
development occurs over a lifetime. Piaget (1964) posited
four major stages of cognitive development that occur
over a lifetime. These stages are sequential and successive. According to Piaget, these stages are Sensorimotor
(birth to two years old), Pre-Operational (2 to 7 years
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